Overview
Taxonomy
The Class Lycopodiopsida is further organized into finer groupings including:
- Order (8): Drepanophycales · Isoetales · Lepidocarpales · Lepidodendrales · Lycopodiales · Miadesmiales · Protolepidodendrales · Selaginellales
- Species: ZipcodeZoo has pages for 4,064 species, subspecies, varieties, forms, and cultivars in the Class Lycopodiopsida.
Orders
Drepanophycales
Isoetales
Isoetales, also written Iso?tales, is an order of plants in the class Isoetopsida. There are about 140-150 living species, all classified in the genus Iso?tes (quillworts), with a cosmopolitan distribution but often scarce to rare. Living species are mostly aquatic or semi-aquatic in clear ponds and slow-moving streams. Each leaf is slender and broadens downward to a swollen base up to 5 mm wide where the leaves attach in clusters to a bulb-like, underground corm characteristic of most quillwort species. This swollen base also contains male and female sporangia, protected by a thin, transparent covering (velum), which is used diagnostically to help identify quillwort species. Quillwort species are very difficult to distinguish by general appearance. The best way to identify them is by examining the megaspores under a microscope. [more]
Lepidocarpales
Lepidodendrales
Lepidodendrales (from Gr. "scale tree") were primitive, vascular, arborescent (tree-like) plants related to the lycopsids (club mosses). They thrived during the Carboniferous period, and some reached heights of over 30 meters, with trunks often more than one meter in diameter. Sometimes called "giant club mosses", they are in fact more closely related to quillworts than to club mosses. [more]
Lycopodiales
Lycopodiopsida is a class of plants often loosely grouped as the fern allies. Traditionally the group included not only the clubmosses and firmosses, but also the spikemosses (Selaginella and relatives) and the quillworts (Isoetes and relatives). However, the latter are now usually separated off into a separate class, Isoetopsida. [more]
Miadesmiales
Protolepidodendrales
Selaginellales
Selaginella is a genus of plants in the family Selaginellaceae, the spikemosses. Many workers still place the Selaginellales in the class Lycopodiopsida (often misconstructed as "Lycopsida"). This group of plants has for years been included in what, for convenience, was called "fern allies". S. moellendorffii is an important model organism, and its genome was sequenced by the United States Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute. [more]
At least 1,332 species and subspecies belong to the Order Selaginellales.
More info about the Order Selaginellales may be found here.
Sources
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